Useful Tools When Traveling

Traveling is fun but usually requires some degree of organizing. Luckily, there are quite a few great tools that make a traveler’s life much easier. Here are some of the apps we love and use most:

1 Second Everyday

We oftentimes wonder about tourists who walk around with their phones or cameras filming everything they see - be it in a museum, in a train station or at dinner. Are they really going to look at these videos again? Or even worse - are they going to let somebody watch a 10 minute take of how they ate their first lobster? But we recently discovered a way to make really cool videos of our trips. Inspired by the wonderful movie Chef, we downloaded the app 1 Second Everyday. It is as easy as it sounds: You take short videos, at least one second every day, upload them in the app, and 1 Second Everyday creates a video with impressions of your journey. If you would like to check out an example of how the video might look like at the end: Here is the latest masterpiece from our trip across the US.

Cost Split

We love traveling together. But what we do not like so much is to sit down after a fun trip, to take out all the receipts of our expenses, and to calculate who owes whom how much money. Did I already give you money for the gas? Who paid dinner at that Mexican restaurant? Was the Airbnb deducted from my account or from yours?... So you can imagine how happy we were when we discovered Cost Split - an app which allows to type in your costs and calculates with one easy click who needs to pay how much money back.

TripIt

Are you one of those people having a hard time to find your reservation for the train, the booking number for your plane ticket, or the confirmation email for your hostel or Airbnb? If so, TripIt might be for you. As they say “You handle the booking, we take care of the rest”: simply create an account, forward your confirmation emails to Tripit, and the service transforms your emails into a single itinerary that you can access on any device - even offline.

Google Maps Offline

The classic: You travel abroad and neither your cell reception nor you internet works, but you would really like to use Google Maps to navigate yourself to a nice beach, bar, or back to your accomodation. The solution to this dilemma: Google Maps Offline. When you are still connected to a wifi network, select the section of the map you would like to access while being offline, type in “OK maps”, and hit the search button. Now, this map is saved on your device, you can zoom for greater detail, and your GPS will still locate you even without data connection - a true lifesaver!